No one ever said keeping track
of any part of your own life would be easy. And when they did, they
were kidding themselves and no one else on the subject. That piece of
supposed wisdom aside, this is my attempt to prove myself wrong as best
I can...

Personal
Affiliations

These are all
organizations I
hold or have held membership in over the years.

The
Ottawa Science Fiction SocietyMember since
1995. I've happily served as cover artist and newsletter editor on an
irregular basis and have also served as Secretary from 2000 to 2001.

The
Legends Amateur Press AllianceMembership from 1989 to 2010. It's a group of comics fans who get together via snail-mail every
two months. Primarily DC Comics titles according to the charter, but
that charter paragraph's honoured more in the breach than the
observance
anyway in its regular snailmail and e-mail discussions, so don't worry
over it. If you're a comics fan looking for an off-net venue to chat with other fans, I recommend this one.

From Comics

J.H. Williams III
and Mick
Gray
- Dan's partners on DC's Chase, and later worked with Alan Moore on
America's Best Comics' Promethea
and with Warren Ellis
on Desolation Jones, which are
each worthy of considerable attention in their own right.

(Before you ask: No, J.H. is no relation to me, direct or otherwise, that either of us is aware of. )

Scott
McCullar - Online acquaintance
and occasional crony in the DCU RPG
freelancers' club. He's been webmaster of several comics professionals'
websites over the years.

Warren Ellis - Quite probably one of
the ten best comics writers active today. I don't always agree with his thinking, but that doesn't make it
any less worth paying attention to.

Christopher Priest
- longtime writer and editor in comics, music producer, and minister. He's been
written at least two of my personal favourites in recent years,
Marvel's Black
Panther and Acclaim/Valiant's Quantum
& Woody.

Dwayne McDuffie
(1962-2011) - senior writer on the Justice League animated
series for the Cartoon Network(also aired in Canada via YTV), co-creator of Damage
Control and Deathlok(the Michael Collins
version) for Marvel, co-founder of the Milestone
Media comics universe, and a fine writer himself.

Leslie
Charteris - the late and much-honoured creator of a
certain Mr. Templar...Simon Templar, known to some
as the Saint.
By necessity, Mr. Charteris' estate runs his website, and I understand from several sources that the bulk of the series is finally back in print, in North America as in the UK.

From
TV and Film

Rick
Sternbach - he spent about 20
years involved with the Star Trek
operation in one artistic capacity for another. A lot of spacecraft and
prop design for that universe's TV series have his fingerprints all
over
them. Nowadays, he's back to freelancing as an SF illustration for
TV,
film and print media, and operating Space Model
Systems.

Gerry
Conway - Co-creator of the Punisher
for Marvel, the original Firestorm for DC,
currently on-staff with Wolf Studios' Law & Order: CI.
Michael Okuda - This is the man for whom "Okudagrams" are now named. With the team of graphic designers under his supervision from 1987 to 2005, in tandem with the aforementioned Rick Sternbach and company, he helped create the "look" of modern Star Trek.

Places and People
I've Done
Business With

Among the people whose
businesses I've been pleased to deal with over the years...

Blambot
Fonts: Nate Piekos' font foundry. One of his products is used
in my logo and others get used in projects of mine from time to time.

Typodermic Fonts:
Based in Ontario, another font design house, run by one Ray Larabie.
His Expressway Bold makes up the other part of my
logo at present, and I'm using other stuff of his for assorted personal
projects.

Canada Type: A
second Ontario-based font design house equally worthy of your
patronage.

Compact Music - my favourite independent music shop in the Ottawa region at the moment.

Perfect Books - first among independent bookstores in the Ottawa region in my mind right now.

Other Assorted
Worthies

Professor
Michael Geist -
member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. Cyberlaw
commentator for assorted news services. Makes sense of the issues he
covers more often than not.

Nigel
Henbest and Heather Couper - space sciences authors
extraordinaire. They co-wrote my favourite book to date on the makeup
of the Milky Way Galaxy, The Guide to the Galaxy,
back in the early 1990's. Go ask the
book's publishers why there hasn't been a revised edition in over
ten years. The book's that good in explaining its topic. And
then there's the maps...

Other Interests

TV

Some of my favourite shows, past and present,
include:

Due
South: Let's face it. It's the quintessential Canadian
super-hero
comedy/drama/police-detective
series. I tend to look on it as Canada's answer to Star Trek:
one of those "Franchises That Cannot Die". How soon CTV and
Alliance-Atlantis
realize this and act accordingly is up in the air, though.

Regrettably, the
official website's been taken down for the foreseeable future, so for
anyone interested in deep background on the show, I recommend William
and
Elyse's Due
South
page.

Power
Play - The great hockey soap
opera. Okay, so Laurin and Davis
didn't set out to create a show about hockey, but rather about the
people
who work in our Great Game, particularly player-agent turned Hamilton
Steelheads
GM Brett Parker. So what? It's a semantic argument over that point, and
besides, the show has been fun to watch. It was supposed to last about
four years, or so they hoped, but it wrapped up well enough in two.

Law &
Order: Need
I say more?
Very competent police/courtroom procedural show. I wish I could watch
it more
regularly, but considering the coverage that its three branch series
have across multiple channels, I don't really have to.

If
anyone can recommend a good fan-run web
resource site for these shows, let me know, okay?

Intelligence
- A CBC crime/espionage drama, from the same guys and gals who've given
us Da Vinci's Inquest/City Hall. Watch it as soon
as you can legally do so.

CyberSix:
Based on the Argentinian comics series created by Carlos Meglio and
Carlos
Trillo, it started airing on Teletoon in 1999 back in that channel's early days on Canada's cable "dial", was rerun steadily for a couple of years thereafter, and is rather different
from much of the rest of super-heroics. A touch of Frankenstein
here
for her origin story, a tad of Victor/Victoria
for her secret identity, a
dress sense borrowing liberally from the Shadow(the hat and suit
color), Catwoman(self-explanatory
once you see her) and Spawn(the
cape)
or so it seems to me. Ranges from
fun to scary and back again very deftly.

The
Mercer Report:
You
know him from This
Hours Has 22
Minutes: Rick Mercer. He's got his own
satire/commentary/"fake
news" program on CBC...and now he has a blog. And
he's using it.

Mike Post: The "Good
TV
Theme Guy".
If he isn't called that in the same tone of respect as is given to Carl
Barks for being "the good Duck artist", I'd like to know the reason
why.
He's been in the business of putting together music for TV shows in the
States for over twenty years now, from at least The Rockford
Files
onward that I know of, and he does good work.

Bruce
Cockburn: Pronounced "koh-burn",
like that actor. Part romanticist, part social activist, all-around
good musician.